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1 sat \ 3 replies \ @shibe 19 May 2023 \ on: Lightning is the future of payments, change my mind bitcoin
Also another concern (besides my other concerns) is the dust limit.
An interesting but not well-known fact of the Lightning Network is that when you make a very small payment (let's say, 100 satoshis), the payment isn't actually "trustless". This is because an HTLC of 100 satoshis can't be put on-chain due to the dust limit, as it's assumed it wouldn't be economical to spend such outputs and thus are considered spam. Thus if your partner tries to cheat you out of these funds you won't be able to settle it on-chain via force-close.
Right now this isn't an issue, the dust limit is a few hundred satoshi and you wouldn't cry over losing such funds (and you assume your channel partner wouldn't try to steal such a small amount from you). But the dust limit will increase as base layer usage increases, I don't know to what extent but what if some day the dust limit is $50? Then the vast majority of LN payments would not be trustless.
Just need to increase the denomination to 128 bits.
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For all existing payment networks, not a single payment is trustless. If lightning enables payments over $50 to be trustless that's a huge upgrade
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The $50 was just an example, it could go higher for all I know. But I don't know, something about that doesn't feel satisfying to me. If we can't offer trustless, decentralized solutions to the majority of the world, then what's the point of all this? Micropayments are a big deal, and one of the big selling points of Lightning
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